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Nikon and The Brevard Nature Alliance present the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival Brevard Community College, Titusville Campus 1311 North U.S. Highway 1, Titusville January 24 - 28, 2007 -- Titusville, Florida A celebration of birds and wildlife. |
The ancient inhabitants of Florida found that birds were good to eat and good to think. These early Floridians emerged from a shadowy past of spear points and extinct animals to become the Ais, Calusa, Tequesta, Timucua and Apalachee described in the accounts of European explorers, priests and settlers. Scientists studying the foodways of these ancient people find bird bones in the village sites that dot the coast and interior of southern Florida. Bird remains from the Boca Weir site in Palm Beach County include many familiar to today's bird watchers: Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, Ruddy Duck, Red-breasted Merganser, Turkey Vulture, Limpkin and Royal Tern, as well as the more unusual, like Great Black-backed Gull, Great Auk and Razorbill. Perhaps even more interesting are the ways Florida's First People thought about birds. For example, some of the earliest carved and decorated bone artifacts, found at the Windover site near Titusville, are pelican bones adorned with geometric designs. Thus begins 7000 years of artistic expression that draws on avian themes.
Studies of ancient Florida art find major influences derived from the Midwest, where some 2000 years ago a mysterious exchange network spread to the far corners of the eastern United States, a network that saw the long-distance trade of exotic items like obsidian, meteorites, copper, mica, rock crystal and ceramic vessels, many of which were decorated with abstract bird motifs. Archaeologists do not completely understand this so-called Hopewell exchange network, but one thing is clear: It provided a major source of imagery for ancient Florida artists who already had recognized animals as an important theme. Portrayals of birds in this period range from very literal depictions, either incised or modeled on pottery, to abstract forms. Intricate loop, scroll and spiral motifs represent abstract feathers and wings and complement more realistic depictions of ducks and other birds.
The animal and avian imagery of the Hopewell horizon inspired the ancient Florida artists to work in local media and traditions. For example, the residents of the Fort Center site on Fisheating Creek in Glades County carved an elaborate collection of wooden mammals and birds that served as markers or guardians of a funereal mound. The bird carvings depicted vultures, owls, raptors, ducks, egrets or herons and a woodpecker, which were ultimately deposited with human burials in a shallow pond. Also notable are the effigy vessels of the Weeden Island culture that flourished in northern Florida over 1500 years ago. Archaeologists and art historians considered Weeden Island effigy ceramics as masterworks of ancient American art. Birds are a major theme, typically modeled and decorated with fine lines and punctuations, and include owls, vultures, crested birds, waterfowl and terrestrial game birds. Not to be outdone, the ancient artists of southern Florida produced a miniature menagerie of many of the animals and birds depicted in the Fort Center carvings and Weeden Island ceramics.
Weeden Island bird effigy bowl, collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville.
Despite major social and cultural upheavals after the arrival of Europeans, the native artists of southern Florida experienced a veritable "golden age" as precious metals from Spanish shipwrecks were reworked into traditional forms. Some of these objects, mostly found in burial sites around Lake Okeechobee, combined naturalistic forms and complex cosmological symbolism. One example of this period is the dagger-like silver hair ornaments that portray the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, complete with a golden eye. Even with their passing from the Florida scene in the mid-18th century, these ancient artists have left a legacy of fluid naturalism in their carved and modeled images of birds and other animals, a glimpse of the way they saw their world.
Silver woodpecker ornament, collection of the South Florida Museum and Bishop Planetarium, Bradenton. Keynote Presentation: January 24, 6:15pm-7:45pm: BCC Auditorium; $10.00
2007 Festival Articles
2007 Keynote Speakers
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